The Sulawesi Bear Cuscus

What has eyes like a lemur, a furry body like a koala, a head like a possum,
is often called a ‘marsupial monkey’, and shares its island home
with pigs, primates and dwarf buffaloes?

The answer is the Sulawesi Bear Cuscus.

This unusual marsupial has many characteristics of a possum, but is closer
in size to a tree kangaroo. It has round, yellow-rimmed eyes, a box-like snout,
long limbs and large feet.

It also has a prehensile (grasping) tail, which it uses as a fifth limb to
navigate its way easily through the tree canopy. The tail coils around a branch
like an anchor while the front limbs secure a hold. The back limbs dangle free
at first, then slowly swing forward to grasp another branch. Bear Cuscuses
travel with such grace that they are sometimes referred to as the ‘slow-motion
acrobats of the forest’.1

The Phalanger genus is made up of seven species of cuscus which
range from Indonesia to northern Australia. However, the Sulawesi Bear Cuscus
is only found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and its satellites.

A recent article in Nature Australia magazine2 described
the geographical distribution of the Bear Cuscus—‘an essentially
Australian type of marsupial’—as strange. This is because Sulawesi
is considered to be a part of Asia, where marsupials are generally not found.
On Sulawesi, the Bear Cuscus shares the tree canopy with typically Asian mammals
such as tarsiers and macaques (both primates), and squirrels.3

It is one of the few Australasian-type marsupials
to be found in the Northern hemisphere.

However, it should always be remembered that beliefs about where animals ‘should’ be
found are tempered by many evolutionary presuppositions. We find animals today
wherever they have arrived/survived following many centuries of migration/dispersion
(initially from Ararat in the case of land vertebrates) after the Genesis Flood.
Thus, there may be large-scale ‘patterns’, since many species have
not arrived separately from each other, but are the result of ‘splitting’ from
one ancestral kind (e.g. different varieties of bear arising from one type,
always with a loss of information, thus no ‘evolution’ in the microbes-to-man
sense).4 But there will ultimately
be no ‘forbidden’ or ‘impossible’ distributions.

The island of Sulawesi is home to two species of cuscus: the Bear Cuscus
(Phalanger ursinus5)
and the Dwarf Cuscus (Phalanger sangirensis6).
They represent the largest and smallest of the cuscuses, with bodies ranging
from 30 to 65 cm (12 to 25 in) and tails from 25 to 60 cm (10 to 24 in).7

Most cuscuses behave like traditional marsupials in that they are more active
in the night than the day. The Bear Cuscus, however, is reported to be the
opposite. Unlike the other cuscuses, which have cat-like slit pupils, the Bear
Cuscus has a round pupil that may not see as well in the dark.3

Experts agree that little is known about the Sulawesi Bear Cuscus because
of its elusiveness. What is known is that it spends most of its life in the
trees, eats leaves and occasionally fruit, and is often found in pairs.

Gary Bell, Oceanwide Images

Many people who’ve been taught that marsupials evolved
in Australia (and that Australia’s preponderance of marsupials is evidence
of that) are surprised to learn about the existence of the cuscus in Indonesia
(here photographed on the island of Sulawesi), and to realize that
the American opossum is also a
marsupial. In fact, instead of marsupial distribution being perceived
as a problem for creationists to explain, it’s actually evolutionists
who have the problem! See Dominic Statham’s thought-provoking 2013
article Migration after the
Flood—how did plants and animals spread around the world so quickly?
(especially the section under the subheading: Marsupial distributions).

Some experts believe, based on its size and those ‘daylight’ pupils,
that the Bear Cuscus is an ancient survivor from an earlier lineage of ancestral
possums.3 Its location on Sulawesi also raises
a number of questions. It is one of the few Australasian-type marsupials to
be found in the Northern hemisphere, and shares its home with a broad mix of
animals, including two species of pig, two species of dwarf buffalo, and several
species of squirrel.8

A commonly held opinion is that the Bear Cuscus rafted to Sulawesi on a mat
of vegetation (evolutionary estimates of time range from 11,000 years ago1 to
30 million years ago3). There, it survived while
those remaining behind on Greater Australia became extinct. In the evolutionist’s
framework, its cousin, the Dwarf Cuscus, must therefore also have done the
same, but it must have done so much later, as it is considered to be more ‘modern’ than
the Bear Cuscus.1

Note how this not only highlights the role of presuppositions, but can be
used to help answer a common objection many people raise concerning how animals
could have crossed deep water to get to remote places after the Flood. To solve
their own conundrums, evolutionists are willing to concede that animals could
have travelled by natural rafts, unaided by humans. So why cannot a creationist
utilize the same explanation for some cases?

There is no indication that either the Bear Cuscus or Dwarf Cuscus, which
are today found together, is a more advanced version of a cuscus than the other.
In fact, they may have descended from the same created kind, just as wolves,
coyotes and dingoes are almost certainly descended from a ‘dog/wolf’ kind.
The cuscus’s ancestors may have arrived on Sulawesi and have diverged
since, or they may be the result of two separate migration/dispersion events.
The evolutionists’ ‘rafting’ explanation might in fact be
correct for one or both of these animals.

Natural selection can explain many of the observed features of animals demonstrating
a ‘fine-tuned’ adaptation to where they currently live. The ‘key’ to
remember is that natural selection only chooses from things, it does not create
them. The information has to be there from which it can choose.9 Evolutionists
often ‘muddy the waters’ by making it sound as if natural selection
and evolution are one and the same thing, which we have repeatedly shown is
not the case.10

Evolutionists often ‘muddy the waters’ by
making it sound as if natural selection and evolution are one and the same thing.

Notice how evolutionists and creationists often believe the same things—natural
selection, rafting to island homes and so on—the difference is generally
that evolutionists slow things down, adding in the time factor. However, rafting
does not take long time periods, nor does migration by dispersion (modern ‘invasions’ of
colonizing animals have shown this repeatedly).

Neither does adaptation by natural selection (given a large created store
of genetic information from which nature can ‘choose’), even to
the extent of forming ‘new’ species, take long, as real-world data
has shown repeatedly.11

We need to understand that the creation/evolution issue is not only about
whether or not, or how, God created. It is also about a clearcut history of
the Earth given in the Bible. If we take God’s Word as written, then
we can make sense of the evidence of the world around us. Animals were not
created in Sulawesi, or in Australia, for that matter. They migrated there
after a globe-destroying catastrophic event (from which such places emerged),
a Flood which was ultimately about judgment on sin. We can see from all this
how issues such as sin and morality cannot be artificially separated from things
like geology, biology—and animal distribution.

It is also clear that creationists and evolutionists use the same science,
basically. The difference is the history into which the science is put.

Remember that the next time you hear someone say the Bible is ‘not
a science textbook’. The point is that you can’t build true science
on a false history of the Earth. Which is all you can end up with if you reject/neglect
the true history in the Creator’s Word to mankind.

Mutation (genetic error) has not been demonstrated to
provide that information source; even in the rare instance where a genetic
defect gives a survival advantage, it is still a loss of information. See Wieland,
C., Beetle bloopers, Creation19(3):30,
1997. Return to text.